Events

Wen Huang, Shenzhen Peng Cheng Laboratory

Since its discovery in 1994, the unconventional superconductivity in Sr2RuO4 has attracted tremendous interest. The prospect of it being a topological chiral p-wave superconductor, which supports Majorana fermions, makes it a potential solid state platform for topological quantum computation. However, despite the multiple signatures in support of chiral p-wave pairing, a number of key measurements in the last decade have called into question this interpretation.

Arnaud Carignan-Dugas, IQC / Department of Applied Mathematics

Inevitably, assessing the overall performance of a quantum computer must rely on characterizing some of its elementary constituents and, from this information, formulate a broader statement concerning more complex constructions thereof. However, given the vastitude of possible quantum errors as well as their coherent nature, accurately inferring the quality of composite operations is generally difficult.

Alan Jamison, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Cooling atomic gases to quantum degeneracy opened the new field of quantum simulation. Here the precise tools of atomic physics can be used to study exotic models from condensed matter or nuclear physics with unique tunability and control. Ultracold molecules bring many new possibilities to quantum simulation. I will review the physics of ultracold molecules, including our recent production of stable, ultracold triplet molecules and what they can add to quantum simulation.

Ashok Ajoy, University of California, Berkeley

The development of atom-like quantum sensors in wide bandgap materials, for instance Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, has thrown up exciting new possibilities for the sensing of materials, molecules and biological systems through optical means. In particular I will describe the development of “quantum-assisted” magnetic resonance probes based on the NV center that allows sensing of nano- and meso-scale volumes at high spatial and frequency resolution [1,2].

Speaker: Rahul Deshpande

Title: Dynamic nuclear polarization in phosphorus doped silicon

Speaker: Thomas K. Hunter

Crafting high-dimensional tools for photonic quantum networks with tailored nonlinear optics

John Donohue, Institute for Quantum Computing

The time-frequency degree of freedom of light offers an intrinsically high-dimensional encoding space which is naturally compatible with waveguide devices and fiber infrastructure. However, coherent manipulation and measurement the information-carrying modes presents a challenge due to the sub-picosecond timescales inherent to downconversion-based photon sources. In this talk, I will discuss methods based on ultrafast pulse shaping and sum-frequency generation to address these temporal modes.

Canada’s future:  Tech Commercialization and Crossing the Chasm - 'How do we enable the Innovators?'

Angela Mondou, author, entrepreneur and founder of ICE Leadership Inc., a consulting company helping technology and aerospace and defence scale-ups, is a former air force captain, tech marketing executive and CEO,  whose unconventional career has taken her from worldwide military operations to top-ranked high-tech companies including Research in Motion, the creators of BlackBerry™.  With her

Kun Fang, University of Cambridge

As a more general form of quantum superposition, quantum coherence represents one of the most fundamental features that set the difference of quantum mechanics from the classical realm. In this talk, we will use the tool of semidefinite programming to study two fundamental tasks relating quantum coherence, i.e., coherence distillation of quantum states and coherence cost of quantum processes.

Joel Wallman, University of Waterloo

Significant global efforts are currently underway to build quantum computers. The two main goals for near-term quantum computers are finding and solving interesting problems in the presence of noise and developing techniques to mitigate errors. In this talk, I will outline and motivate an abstraction layer needed to reliably operate quantum computers under realistic noise models, namely, a cycle consisting of all the primitive gates applied to a quantum computer within a specified time period.